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Digital Archeology with Drive-Independent Data Recovery: Now, With More Drive Dependence!

by: Chris Fenton

Publication date: 2011

Topics: data, disk, drive, positioning, servo, pack, stepper, analog, head, cdc, disk pack, read head, stepper motor, disk drive, servo data, analog data, disk drives, spare disk, head assembly, test disk

Collection: sketch_stacks; the_stacks; additional_collections

Contributor: Chris Fenton

Language: English

Item Size: 22.5M

The goal of this project was to recover the data from an 80 Megabyte CDC 9877 disk pack that potentially contains system software for a Cray-1 supercomputer that may be of some minor historical interest. It is quite challenging to recover data from obsolete digital media for a variety of reasons – functioning hardware can be difficult to come by, as well as difficult to interface with even if you have it, and magnetic media can degrade over time, especially if not stored in an archival environment. The target media for this project is a disk pack containing three double-sided 14”-diameter platters containing data – five data surfaces and one 'servo' surface, which provides alignment data for the other five surfaces.